Memories of McNamara

Birch Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, began his 18-year Senate career in 1963, as the U.S. role in Vietnam was expanding. Bayh spent his early months in the Senate watching President John F. Kennedy and his national security team – including the late Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense – wrestle with how intensely to aid the faltering South Vietnamese regime against the communist North. Like most of the Senate, Bayh voted for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, pushed by President Lyndon Johnson. But Bayh later turned against the Vietnam effort, becoming a vociferous critic of what he considered a lost cause. In an interview Monday, Bayh suggested McNamara’s would be remembered as a brilliant strategic planner dealing as best he could with institutional constraints, but marred by an inability – or unwillingness – to speak truth to power.

McNamara died Monday at the age of 93.

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What is Secretary McNamara’s legacy regarding Vietnam?

He was probably one of the brightest persons who ever served in government. One could have nothing but respect for his native intelligence and his managerial skills. He had prospered and thrived in the corporate world.

Secretaries of defense have to rely on people in the field. In Vietnam, the military brass in the field at the top had a certain idea of how to win the war. I’m not sure they fully comprehended the kind of struggle we faced in Vietnam.

He did the best he knew how to do. He had no military experience himself and was relying on people on the ground. They gave him very bad information and he acted on it. But who do you turn to at that point?

When I was over there, I would be courteous and listen to the military briefings, and then do my own investigations. I don’t know if it’s possible for a secretary of defense to do that. The command structure was almost set up to perpetuate it. That’s the way the military operates.

We have some commanders now in Iraq and Afghanistan who are more forthright in their willingness to voice their doubts.

Did you in private ever hear Secretary McNamara ever give anything but full-throated support for the Vietnam War effort, as he did in public?

No, I never heard something different. I remember one time my wife and I were invited to go to Camp David. McNamara, [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk and I were on a plane together. They were discussing military tactics and I never heard anybody give any judgment other than what McNamara was saying at the time in public.

Early on, both McNamara and the president were in difficult positions. LBJ was looking for advice, and was in an almost impossible position. A hero and idol of the country had been assassinated. He inherited all of Kennedy’s team, and to do otherwise would have looked like an insult to the late president. So whether he wanted to bring in his own advisers or not was irrelevant.

At what point did you begin to have doubts about the likelihood of victory of Vietnam, despite what Secretary McNamara and generals in the field were saying?

For several years I went along with the president, because I thought he was trying to do what was right. Sen. Wayne Morse (D-Ore.) was one of the few people who really spoke extensively about the subject, calling Vietnam “McNamara’s War.” And that was before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I went over there in January 1968, just before the Tet offensive. I came back there with much different views of what was going over there than when I arrived.

I came to think we should never have gotten involved in that war in the first place. This was a colonialist empire that the French been run out of. But McNamara’s recommendations to the president to send all those combat troops in there prolonged it interminably. We were never going to win that battle at a price we were willing to pay.